AI and the Missing Mother

The Star Child. Still from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

There are a few quotations that come up frequently in my work. One is from the twentieth-century German philosopher Günther Anders:

Human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made.

It expresses Anders’s idea of Promethean shame: modern humans’ sense that their fleshy, mortal, meatspace selves are inferior to the beautifully designed and constructed machines they build. Machines are predictable and efficient; they operate in a rational man...